


it was meant to pass

by Anonymous



Category: Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School
Genre: Afterlife, Introspection, Multi, i don't know how to tag the relationship as it is in the fic forgive me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-21 20:14:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12465072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: How funny, they'd laugh, how they'd both liked their best friend.(It didn't pass.)





	it was meant to pass

It was meant to pass.  

It was meant to pass, as those fleeting high school loves between his classmates did. He thought one night, tired and frustrated and utterly in love, of a day in the future, years and years from then. He could imagine them clearly, him and Chisa, sitting side by side in a bar after one too many drinks and wondering where Kyosuke'd run off to. He'd be bolder then, a bit more sure of himself and a whole hell of a lot less scared, and there would be things he let himself admit to her. She'd have a ring on her finger that glinted low in the warm light and that same smile from their days at Hope's Peak, and there would be no lingering sting of jealousy when he finally said the words. 

How funny, they'd laugh, how they'd both liked their best friend. 

(It didn't pass.)  

Kyosuke gave their graduation speech. He spoke of dreams given shape, of ambitions carving paths through a boundless future.    

Juzo shifted in his plastic chair and thought of every university, every pro circle invitation stacked nearly into piles atop his desk at home. He'd read them over meticulously, considered his options with all the care one would expect from a soon to be graduate of Hope's Peak. He was a world champion at seventeen. He could reign for years, if he wanted to, carve out his place in the boxing world and dare challengers to appear before him. If he didn't have that, his one single talent, what else  _did_  he have? Juzo blinked, visions of the distant ring and faceless opponents replaced by the hard metal backs of folding chairs. He looked back up at Kyosuke, forever facing the future, relentlessly pressing forwards- a sight he'd seen a hundred times before. He would follow Kyosuke anywhere. And that was his answer; the answer it was always going to be. He had that which he could choose for himself, even if those were words he'd never say. 

( _Of cou_ _r_ _se_ _it didn't_ , he thought at the very end. Of course it didn't pass, because even then, he-) 

She said it as if it was nothing. She said it as if it wasn't the thing he'd staunchly denied for the better part of his early friendship with Kyosuke, as if the right words hadn't been so hard to find, as if there weren't people listening, laughing- 

He groveled before Enoshima Junko, the tip of her heel digging into his temple, and made up his mind, built up resolve steadfast as a part of his integrity crumbled away beneath the weight of a single name. 

He'd tell Kyosuke once he'd realized his ambitions and become chairman. For better or worse, whether Kyosuke and Chisa had stopped dancing around each other or not- he would confess. 

If this was his weakness, then let it be a secret exploited no more. 

Once Kyosuke became chairman. Juzo took a long breath, shaking the shattered brick from his bloodied fist. He could do that.  

(He loved Kyosuke. Too proudly to lie, too proudly to tell.) 

She called him Kyosuke. He thought, back then, that he'd like to call him by name too. And he could, he supposed. They’d orbited around each other through Chisa’s influence long enough that they considered each other friends- or so he hoped, at least. 

But he called her Yukizome. He called her by her last name, always holding her affection at a friendly but comfortable distance, no matter how much sweetness she directed at him. 

“Munakata,” he greeted, accented with a tilt of his head. 

“Good morning,” came the reply with a quick meeting of eyes- and then they shuffled to take their seats, the world the same again today. 

He didn't know, then, that the name spoken as familiar, as indulgent as childhood comforts, would be his last. If he did, he would've thought it apt. 

(But “love” never meant that he even had a chance.) 

It wasn't the setup he had intended. He had meant for a celebratory dinner, a tasteful, but ultimately useless gift, and a quiet conversation. Something far from bloody and beaten and stepping careful around the corpses of their former comrades. 

But Kyosuke was chairman and something was very, very wrong. They were trapped, and death sought them out with every passing hour, and this, somehow, gave him courage.  

(I love you, he thought, unable to form the words. Not for the tang of blood on his lips or the heaviness of his tongue, no-  _I love you_ , he thought, and it was resolve that stuck the words in his throat.)   

He thought he might be dying. He wondered, idly,  if that was a thought he was supposed to have.  The world swam around Kyosuke's turned back. He’d thought about it, during the early days of Despair. How he'd die, what his last words would be- compared to what he'd daydreamed in the moments closest to despair, this wasn’t the worst way to go. Hell, it wasn’t even  _undeserved_. 

Kyosuke didn’t spare him a glance as he turned the corner. In the absence of his white suit, the world gave way to a shifting patchwork of black. Juzo closed his eyes against it. And like that, a memory more like the start of a long dream- 

"Hmm?" Chisa started to walk backwards, looking up at him with a gentle worry behind teasing manner. "Is something wrong?" 

The early morning sun caught her up in its rays, and Juzo stopped, taking her in. She was bright and dazzling and beautiful, and he loved her, though not nearly in the same way as Kyosuke. Not nearly the way he was supposed to. 

Chisa too stopped in her tracks, then took a step towards him, watching his expression carefully. What she saw, he didn’t know, and didn’t care to ask. 

He shook his head. “It’s nothing.” He brushed past her with long strides, and she made a small noise of protest as she scrambled after him. 

As she caught up, she started to babble about something inconsequential, something that he didn’t have to pay much attention to and that she likely didn’t expect him to. It filled the silence between them nicely as they walked through the school gates, Chisa taking a stride and a half for his every one. 

Juzo glanced down at her again. She was animated and energetic and had a kind radiance about her that was infectious, even when she was being meddlesome. He loved her, this lasting friend of his. 

If Enoshima Junko had stopped there- if she, by some miracle of human error, had stopped with  _'_ _Yukizome_ _Chisa_ _'_ \- then that was a lie he could have lived. Maybe even happily. But he never was meant for happy endings. He knew that from the very beginning.

(It would never be quite the same. Though, he was never sure he could love anyone in the same way as Kyosuke. He supposed, as he pulled that final lever with the last, bloody shards of his life, that he would never get the chance to find out. 

That wasn't a bad thing. Just like how this wasn't a bad way to go. 

In the final moments of his life, if nowhere else- let him do  _good._ ) 

They sat, side by side in a dimly lit bar. Glasses of beer rested in front of them, trails of condensation dripping down their sides. Next to him, Chisa glanced around the bar, taking in the low lights and dark wood, the quiet ambiance of an empty place that should be filled with people. 

“You know,” she said, “this place is a lot nicer than mine.” 

In a swift motion, Juzo grabbed his glass by the handle and downed a gulp of it, the taste familiar if nothing else. It wasn’t one drink too many, he thought, setting the glass back on the bar, but hell, it was something. 

“Good thing he didn’t go first. Can you even imagine it? He’d be waiting around for us in his  _office_  for half a century. You think he acts like a stale old salaryman now? Just think what that would do to him.” 

Chisa’s eyes went wide for a moment, and it was as if something between them had shattered, shards of glass ground into dust. Her shock turned to quick, frantic giggles, and she threw herself forwards to wrap her arms around Juzo’s torso, head buried in his shirt. 

“Hey, whoa,” he said, putting his arms around her shaking shoulders as he tried to steady her wobbling stool with a foot. 

“Thank you,” Chisa said. The sound of her laughter gave way to a sniffle, to breaths she couldn’t quite manage to catch. “Thank you for saving Kyosuke.” 

Juzo lifted a hand, hesitated, then dropped it lightly on Chisa’s head. Her hair was soft. He said, slowly, “You would have done the same thing if the Despairs had gotten me, instead.” 

Chisa’s breath still came in irregular puffs, but she hummed her agreement. He stared down at his left hand, fingertips nestled in Chisa’s light hair. He hadn’t had the time to get used to it being gone, and yet here it was again, as if he’d never cut it off in the first place. He hesitated again- physical affection had never been something so freely offered- then gently patted Chisa’s head again and said, “I’m… I’m just glad he’s going to get out of this alive. That’s all I need to know.” 

“But I…” A sniffle. “I wish… wish you could have stayed with him.” 

“Hey, if anyone should have been able to stay with him, it should have been you,” he replied, but Chisa was already pushing away, her face tear-streaked but that familiar determination evident in the set of her jaw, the light in her eyes. 

She shook her head. “No. Despair took me a long time before any of this. You know that. If I had lived, I would have hurt him one day. I guess I already did, huh?” She paused, briefly, to wipe at her eyes. The look she gave him afterwards was significant, in a way that she’d always hidden under an innocent playfulness, before. 

“But just like me, you…” She trailed off, giving him the offer he’d been too scared to reach out and take so many times before. He could finish that sentence any way he pleased. He settled for the truth. 

“Yeah,” he finished, “I love him.” 

The words went free. Nothing much changed, save for the soft smile that lit up Chisa’s face.  

“It's rude of me to say that I already knew, isn't it? Though you weren’t always very subtle,” Chisa said, ducking her head a bit, peeking up through bangs thrown out of place to gauge his reaction. 

Juzo chuckled, once, gruff. No, he supposed, he really hadn’t been, not nearly as much as he should have before Enoshima had forced him into a corner with it. It was easy, in retrospect, to count out all his mistakes, to line them up one by one until they formed the thread of his narrative more than he himself. But he'd saved Kyosuke. If nothing else, he'd done that. 

Chisa let out a breath and lifted her head, understanding she'd been forgiven the leading statement. She laughed, a quiet, genuine little thing that filled the bar with all the warmth it had been missing.  

“It’s just kind of funny,” Chisa continued, “that we both fell in love with our best friend.” 

“Yeah,” he replied, “it kind of is.”  

Juzo wasn’t sure what he had been expecting- maybe like the weight of the world would be lifted from his shoulders, maybe like the weight of it would double down from rejection- but this, he figured, was just fine. It was better than he ever really thought he was going to get- so he’d take it, even though the world had to burn. 

(He waited out his love, only to find that it would not abate, would not leave him. And despite himself, despite knowing he’d part ways with them at the gates of Hell, he smiled. Whether he'd be hated or loved, whether the three of them would steal away a few more moments in the memory of a bar that doesn't exist or if he'd be thrown away and abandoned yet again- 

Regardless of it all, he and Chisa would greet him with twin words, the depths of them not dulled even through the decades. 

He'd said them once. To say them again, he didn't mind waiting a little while longer.)  

**Author's Note:**

> sakakura is... important to me


End file.
